ABQReport “While Albuquerque bleeds, Mayor Keller smiles”

On December 9, 2019, the city recorded its 74th homicide, the all time record of homicides in one year in the city’s history. The previous record was in 2017 with 72 murders. Before 2017, the last time the City had the highest number of homicides in one year was in 1996 with 70 murders that year.

On December 9, Channel 4 devoted at least one third of its evening 10:00 PM news cast to the story with the news angle of demanding answers from our elected officials and zeroing in on Mayor Tim Keller. The beginning of the story and comments by the news anchors were as hard hitting as it gets and can only be described as a full throttled take down of Mayor Keller on how he avoided to be interviewed all day with the news anchors questioning his failed and lack of leadership.

Mayor Keller’s full 2 minute interview was telecast without any interruptions and needless to say it was obvious he was out of his comfort zone and his trade mark smile was gone. You can view the entire newscast story at this link.

https://www.kob.com/albuquerque-news/keller-speaks-on-record-setting-homicide/5574753/?cat=500

ABQREPORTS COLUMN

ABQReports is an on line Albquerque news column publshed by DENNIS DOMRZALSKI. Mr. DOMRZALSKI has been a reporter for 35+ plus years and worked for the Albquerque Tribune for a number of years reporting on city hall, the courts and crime scene. He later worked for the on line publication ABQ News and 4 years ago he began ABQReports:

The following column was published on December 12, 2019 and written by its editor DENNIS DOMRZALSKI. (The link to the article is at the end.)

“Tim, get busy and be the mayor that we need. Please.”

That anguished plea to Mayor Tim Keller was posted Wednesday on our Facebook page in response to Dan Klein’s columns about how an Albuquerque police detective screwed up a murder investigation and jailed an innocent 17-year-old girl for six days. It’s also a plea for Keller to get really tough on crime and on the criminals who are ravaging this city and ruining life for law-abiding taxpayers who pay Keller’s salary.

Can Keller be the mayor we need right now? Can he be a mayor who will say that he and his police department won’t tolerate crime and the fiends, creeps, lowlifes and scum who are ruining this once nice city? Can he be the mayor who prods and inspires the District Attorney’s office and the judiciary to work feverishly on our behalf to lock criminals up and keep the rest of us safe?

I doubt it. And two years into his term, we can say that Keller has been a failure as a mayor when it comes to battling crime and keeping us safe. And we don’t think he’s going to get any better and grow into the job.

Keller just doesn’t seem capable of declaring for all to see and hear that his administration will do everything possible in its power to lock criminals up. He can’t seem to get out there and say something like, “We’re declaring war on criminals and we will show them no mercy. We will not tolerate scumbags breaking into our homes, stealing our cars, assaulting us, raping us and killing our neighbors. And if you’re one of those scumbags who preys on law-abiding people we’re coming after you with a vengeance.”

In fact, Keller seems lost. In a recent TV interview when a reporter asked him what he was going to do about the record number of homicides this year, Keller was sad and pathetic. He babbled on about domestic violence and guns, and who knows what else. And it was just babbling that said nothing. He had a chance to declare war on crime, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it.

Instead, he flashed his handsome smile and, well, babbled. If his smile was meant to reassure us that he was on the job and working furiously to make our streets safer, it didn’t work. Keller looked lost. And the smile was one of those uneasy, pathetic things that try to mask fear, incompetence and a total lack of understanding of the situation. It was the sad smile of someone who is in over his head. It was the smile of someone pretending to know the answers, when at heart he knows he didn’t study for the test.

I don’t know why Keller can’t declare war on criminals, draw a line in the sand, or say and do whatever it takes to start the war on criminals. Maybe he’s one of those pathetic souls who is paralyzed by the need to be liked by everyone. Maybe he thinks that being a hard-ass will make his liberal and progressive cult-like followers think he’s a bad and insensitive man.

Maybe Keller truly believes that murderers, rapists, muggers, robbers, burglars and carjackers are misunderstood and that they’re really nice people and that it’s the fault of law-abiding citizens and the evil capitalist society that have driven these oppressed people to crime.

Maybe Keller doesn’t believe that people who steal our stuff and money are criminals. Maybe he thinks that they are redistributing wealth and money to their oppressed and misunderstood selves.

I don’t know. But what I do know is that two years into his term, Keller is a failure as a mayor and as a leader. He goes for the fluff stuff like weeping at the border and creating a department of inclusion, while dodging the hard stuff like people getting assaulted and robbed and raped. He can’t bring himself to fire incompetent people, and he smiles when he’s lied to. So far, no one has been fired over crime statistics fiasco in which Keller and his police department lied about falling crime rates.

Another Facebook user put it this way:

“The mayor is is not going to change; he is a good-hearted liberal who has no idea how to combat crime and no desire to move against the consent decree. As for Chief Geier, he is going to do what Mayor Keller dictates. My money says unless Mayor Keller takes the cuffs off his officers and uses his bully pulpit to go after the DA and the judiciary he will be a one-term mayor.”

Great leaders—even moderately good ones—often have to be hard-asses and take control. Keller seems incapable of that, and we’re the ones who are suffering the consequences of that failure.

So the sickening status quo will continue. While Albuquerque bleeds, Mayor Tim Keller smiles.”

https://www.abqreport.com/single-post/2019/12/12/While-Albuquerque-bleeds-Mayor-Keller-smiles

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About

Pete Dinelli was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is of Italian and Hispanic descent. He is a 1970 graduate of Del Norte High School, a 1974 graduate of Eastern New Mexico University with a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and a 1977 graduate of St. Mary's School of Law, San Antonio, Texas. Pete has a 40 year history of community involvement and service as an elected and appointed official and as a practicing attorney in Albuquerque. Pete and his wife Betty Case Dinelli have been married since 1984 and they have two adult sons, Mark, who is an attorney and George, who is an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). Pete has been a licensed New Mexico attorney since 1978. Pete has over 27 years of municipal and state government service. Pete’s service to Albuquerque has been extensive. He has been an elected Albuquerque City Councilor, serving as Vice President. He has served as a Worker’s Compensation Judge with Statewide jurisdiction. Pete has been a prosecutor for 15 years and has served as a Bernalillo County Chief Deputy District Attorney, as an Assistant Attorney General and Assistant District Attorney and as a Deputy City Attorney. For eight years, Pete was employed with the City of Albuquerque both as a Deputy City Attorney and Chief Public Safety Officer overseeing the city departments of police, fire, 911 emergency call center and the emergency operations center. While with the City of Albuquerque Legal Department, Pete served as Director of the Safe City Strike Force and Interim Director of the 911 Emergency Operations Center. Pete’s community involvement includes being a past President of the Albuquerque Kiwanis Club, past President of the Our Lady of Fatima School Board, and Board of Directors of the Albuquerque Museum Foundation.